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AM ON THE ROAD

TONY EASTLEY: Good Morning this is AM, coming to you live from the Queen Victoria Markets in Melbourne.

(Sounds of market vendors calling their wares)

AM is this week looking at the future of food; what we grow and eat, and can Australia really become the food bowl of Asia as politicians would have us believe?

Around me there's a sea of fruit and vegetables.

Vivian Zampierollo is unpacking her produce as the forklifts move back and forth. She feels as though she's spent all her life here.

VIVIAN ZAMPIEROLLO: I'm second generation. My father was in here for 45 years and I was out here within about three months, (laughs) when I was three months old.

TONY EASTLEY: So as a little girl you were here?

VIVIAN ZAMPIEROLLO: Yes I was. My parents set me up in a box out the back and there I went, and I actually did the same with my daughter as well. I came back to work and she was in a little crate out the back.

TONY EASTLEY: Do you love it?

VIVIAN ZAMPIEROLLO: Yeah I must. A normal day would be, I'd be up at one o'clock in the morning, I'd get here about two thirty, trade until closing time, which is about two, go back to the warehouse, do about an hour of work there and then go home by about four o'clock.

TONY EASTLEY: Explain to me what you've got in for sale here?

VIVIAN ZAMPIEROLLO: We've got a lot of different things. The greens, such as celery, broccoli, cauliflower. They're sourced locally from areas like Werribee and Clyde and Pearcedale.

TONY EASTLEY: So they're local market gardens that supply to you?

VIVIAN ZAMPIEROLLO: Yes they are, yes they are indeed. And then things that can't- that aren't grown in Victoria or aren't in season in Victoria such as carrots, they're sourced from Western Australia, and we've got capsicums from Queensland or South Australia.

We do a limited of things from overseas. We stock baby corn from Thailand, only because there's one grower of baby corn in Australia and they're contracted to the supermarkets, unfortunately.

Also we stock shiitake mushrooms from China.

TONY EASTLEY: And overall, are the markets still doing a good trade?

VIVIAN ZAMPIEROLLO: Not too bad, I would say. I would say every year it gets a little bit quieter and quieter but we are trying…

TONY EASTLEY: What do you put that down to?

VIVIAN ZAMPIEROLLO: Competition, I would say, and convenience of supermarkets and... unfortunately.

TONY EASTLEY: Could there be a day when markets like this will no longer be around, do you think?

VIVIAN ZAMPIEROLLO: Quite possibly. I mean, I would say the Victoria Market is quite safe but some of the little markets out in the suburbs like Camberwell Market and Prahran Market, I think they're struggling at the moment.

TONY EASTLEY: Vivian Zampierollo at Vic markets in Melbourne where we're broadcasting from this morning.

Most fresh perishables are grown on the edges of our cities by small, family-run operations. Land around Sydney produces 80 per cent of the perishable vegetables eaten by Sydneysiders.

But the cities are threatening to swallow up the market gardeners. A metropolitan strategy for Sydney allows more than 220,000 new homes to be built on agricultural land.

A government report predicts half of today's vegetable gardens will be lost to growing suburbs within 20 years.

The squeeze is on in Perth too. WA's population increased by more than 78,000 people last year.

To meet growing demand Australia has become a net importer of fruit and vegetables. A lot comes from New Zealand and China. More on that odd symbiotic trade relationship later.

(Sound of tractor)

Ed Biel is spraying for weeds around his fruit trees on his small property one and a half hours drive south-west of the centre Sydney.

ED BIEL: Oh we grow stone fruit, Tony, mainly peaches, plums nectarines, apricots... and a few other odds and ends.

TONY EASTLEY: Ed Biel talking there. He's aware of the growing number of imports but it's the threat of urban sprawl and non productive hobby farms that keeps him awake at night.

ED BIEL: It's getting harder and it's getting more costly, unfortunately. The profitability that we once had is gone now. There's just no fat left in this farm and if we- if our costs increase all but a little bit, we're totally... we're gonna be out the door backwards. We'll be broke.

They talk about Australia providing the food bowl for Asia and the rest of the world but unless profitability can increase and our cost structures modified, that's not going to happen. That's just a wish.

TONY EASTLEY: So you told me you're going to stick around for a while but ultimately, I mean, do you have to sell or could you sell the farm to someone?

ED BIEL: As a productive farm it would be well nigh impossible to sell. If I wanted to sell it, my main market would be lifestyle people that have got a horse or two for their kids and I'd have to push the farm out to make it saleable.

TONY EASTLEY: But then you'd end up with sort of non-productive farmland, a farm that looks like a farm but is not a farm.

ED BIEL: Exactly. You'd end up with what we've got in the majority of the Sydney basin now - basically a green desert.

TONY EASTLEY: Orchardist Ed Biel on his property outside of Sydney.

Between overseas competition, the tough buying practices of the big supermarket chains and the increasing value of rural land, Ed Biel and others like him are under pressure.

(Sounds of the market)

At a community growers' market near the old Sydney showgrounds, it's a similar story. To make their businesses viable stall holders travel for hours to sell their produce.

PHIL LAVERS: Well old farmers basically make more money by selling up and sitting on the money by earning interest than they do by all the hard yakka involved in farming. So they sell the land and then someone comes and buys it who isn't a farmer, who doesn't know how to work the land.

They hire someone to stick a few cattle on it and that's the end of the market gardening business.

TIM KEMP: It's the future that I'm sort of concerned about because I'm third generation, my boys are going to be fourth, and I'm concerned for them. If they want to take over the farm, which I'm happy for them to do, then it's all that support stuff around them that's going to be hard to find.

TONY EASTLEY: Different political parties have got different ideas of what should happen in the future. What's a tip for them from you and other stallholders like yourself around here as to a food plan, if you like, for Australia?

TIM KEMP: Yeah number one tip from me is don't sell us down the road when you're negotiating free trade agreements. That's one of my big bugbears. I'm largely an avocado producer and that could cripple us.

TONY EASTLEY: Tim Kemp from Sydney and before him Phil Lavers at the EQ growers market in Sydney's eastern suburbs.

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